Philippe Matthews Show Guru Advice, Author Reviews, Tech Reviews, Entertainment News

Dear EarthTalk : Is it true that only a handful of outdated coal-burning power plants emit a sizable amount of the mercury pollution generated in the U.S.? If so, is anything being done to clean these sites up or shut them down? --Frank Pearson, Wichita, Kans

Sitting in a darkened lab at the National Institutes of Health in 1999, my

Help find the first pristine interstellar dust particles ever brought to Earth [More]

Dear EarthTalk : What will be the effect of all the flooding along the Mississippi River for organic farmers, given all the pollutants in the water? When they recover, can they still certify their products as organic? --Michael O’Loughlin, Tigard, Ore.

There’s a habit that’s had scientists puzzled: the practice of geophagy--eating dirt.

As the clean energy industry emerges from a challenging period caused by the global economic downturn, it is entering a stage of rapid change in which business models are being transformed against a backdrop of regulatory uncertainty. In several key sectors, the market is shifting back toward business structures and technologies that were once abandoned, but are now being revived

More than half the people on Earth now live in cities, so they'll be where we have to face our changing weather patterns. The most prepared cities are finding ways to keep citizens safe--and make them money. Even if you haven't been paying attention to the seemingly nonstop stream of wacky weather recently, chances are that your local government has.

What's nudging comets our way?

Nope--this isn't a special effects shot from a movie, this really is Space Shuttle Endeavour near the ISS. She's busy returning to Earth even as you read this, ending her final mission in space. On with the news: 1

Dear EarthTalk : How are wild dolphins faring on the high seas? Recent reports of dolphin deaths in the Gulf of Mexico may well be due to last year’s BP oil spill, but I imagine there are many threats to dolphins from pollution, human overfishing and other causes.

For a limited time, the full text of this article is being made available for fans of Scientific American's page on Facebook. Read it now or become a fan . One hundred years ago, in June 1911, Robert Falcon Scott and 32 explorers--most of them British scientists, naval officers or seafarers--were huddled in the darkness of the Antarctic winter, when the sun never rises above the horizon and up to eight feet of ice seals the surrounding sea

By Eugenie Samuel Reich of Nature magazine As Earth's biggest "ear" on the Universe, the giant 305-meter radio dish at Arecibo , Puerto Rico, has played a part in groundbreaking discoveries, searches for alien civilizations and the occasional Holly

Fantastically detailed, visually arresting photographs of Andromeda, a spiral galaxy that lies 2.5 million light-years from Earth, have been available for years.

Giant swirling masses of seawater known as mesoscale eddies roam the world's oceans. Whipped up by surface winds and girded by the Coriolis effect (produced by Earth's rotation), eddies may grow to several hundred kilometers in diameter and are known to transport heat, chemicals and biology throughout the oceans' shallower depths. A new study published April 29 in Science suggests that eddies may have a deeper reach than previously thought, helping to shape some of the most remote ecosystems on Earth--deep-sea hydrothermal vents.

%excerpt% The rest is here: The Learning Company